Project placement finalised, presentations to prepare for and a bit of Counting Crows.

I haven’t had much time of late to really update this thing… I’ve never fabricated myself to be this elite blogger, so don’t ever expect me to be anything like that. I honestly hope that any content you find in here doesn’t come with an air of pretence. It isn’t me, and it never will be.

Anyway, I’ve had a busy weekend going back to Manchester primarily to pick up my cat, but to also show someone rather special around Manchester (or bits of it… it was lovely anyway). I shared in my last post an interesting article that was found regarding shark fins… interesting (and important) given the aims to get the selling of, and use of shark fins banned worldwide; a movement that I undoubtedly 100% back. The post before that was what I really wanted to talk about…

On Friday I mentioned that I was just about to go and meet a woman about a summer placement, well… I met up with her and guess who’s going to be the Project Officer for the Teesside & Cleveland coast wading bird conservation project? You guessed it! It is only for a couple of months as part of my MSc however I will be getting a first look at how the companies are both working together (Natural England and INCA) in assessing the effects of human disturbance on wading bird populations on the coast, as well as mapping bird hotspots focussing on separate species, at different tide times, in different weather conditions. It’s going to be exciting, albeit a little scary. I need to really up my confidence and actually do this. I know I can do it, I know I’m intelligent enough to gather the required information; I just wish I was more confident in a) what I do and b) public speaking. We’re in the process of trying to muster together a meeting at the beginning of my reading week (week beginning 20^th Feb) which should be good. I’ll be meeting with Catherine from Natural England and Bob from INCA, as well as Katherine whom I met Friday.

I've never actually been to this area of England before (I know, I know, shameful...) but I'm looking forward to visiting the site and meeting the team.

Regarding public speaking, I’m going to have to get used to that a little sooner than the project placement presentation. In about two weeks I’ll have to help present a 40 minute presentation on some aspect of protected areas management (difficult, the module isn’t exactly what we thought it would be like) and then a week or so after the reading week I’ll have to help present another 30-40 minute presentation on some aspect of fisheries management (this should be a little easier and definitely more interested). I was a little gutted, the first seminar group had their titles last week and I would have loved to have done it – fisheries and bycatch – unfortunately with me going away at the weekend, having next Sunday off (Whitby!) and having the first seminar to prepare for, it just wasn’t doable. Still, I’m sure our topic will be just as interesting.

Must go, I’m sitting here singing away to Counting Crows when really I should be using my time to do some cleaning and my stats ‘R’ assignment.

Ciao! 

Rocky Shore, Mount Batten

I absolutely love this photo and it has some excellent memories attached. When I was at the University of Plymouth doing my undergraduate degree, we used to come here for most field trips in order to assess the rocky shore intertidal zone, collect data on various things. I had to collect the organisms for my dissertation here also - rock chips containing Chthalamus montagui barnacles (I had to remove the few Semibalanus balanoides that were present), the dog whelk Nucella lapillus (boreal-lusitanian species) and the oyster drill Ocenebra erinacea (classically a warm water species). I had some very fun times here. We even used to come for fun, just to sit on the rocks, have a good mooch in the rockpools seeing whether we could find the biggest edible crab (Cancer pagurus) or the biggest velvet swimming crab (Necora puber) - obviously we did this as to not largely disturb their habitat. In fact, it's a big message to any keen rockpooler - it's all good to go and have a look, turn over the rocks to see what's lurking, but please put the rocks back in the exact same place and be very wary of what is actually underneath the rock. If you drop it in the water without much consideration for what might be living there, you'll probably end up killing things!!

I had some very good times here anyway and I actually do miss Plymouth, mainly for this shore.